What bituminous rock did I crawl out from under?

Last night two TV ads astonished me.  Both were for Citizen's Energy, an alliance that's been providing one-time 100 gallon shipments of free heating oil to impoverished US households in 23 states.  The oil comes from Venezuela, from CITGO, in fact.

I wish I could find the ads on the internet so I could link you to them.  When I do, I will.

According to Citizen's Energy website, the program has been distributing free oil since 1979.  1979 was only four years after the US sold wheat to the USSR to supplement the Soviet Republic's poor grain harvest.  Everybody knows that the US provides foreign aid, it doesn't receive it, right?

US citizens shivering in possibly-to-be-foreclosed houses will be grateful for foreign aid or anything that keeps their pipes from freezing.  I hope that those of us with more choices will bear in mind that Venezuela's Orinoco Belt is the world's greatest supplier of orimulsion(r).

My father, Ken Hadow, waged the best fight of his life combating Florida Power & Light's application to burn Venezuelan orimulsion at its Manatee Power Plant. 

Orimulsion is a tar-like bituminous fuel with a sulfur content of 3.8%.  To evade OPEC quotas on oil, Venezuela tagged it a "non-conventional fuel" or "liquid coal."  Others just call it "the world's dirtiest fuel."

Thanks to efforts like my father's, the market in the US, Canada and the UK dried up.  Now Venezuela sells millions of tons of inexpensive orimulsion to China, where, mixed with water, it burns like coal, releasing heavy concentrations of sulfur, and fueling cheap Chinese exports.

Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez calls the trade between China and Venezuela "a "Great Wall" against American hegemonism."

In 2006, Bloomberg News reported that

Chavez, whose country is the world's fifth-largest oil producer, had hinted he would seize the assets by raising taxes and royalties on the four ventures. Chavez, a critic of U.S. President George W. Bush, also blames capitalism for global poverty and has endorsed socialism as the best way to right economic inequalities.

Chávez did seize those assets.  In 2008, Reuters reported that

President Hugo Chavez last year led a nationalization crusade that gave the state control over the projects once run by companies including Exxon Mobil (XOM.N) and ConocoPhillips (COP.N), which have taken Venezuela to arbitration for the takeover.

Why would a nation that obviously finds the US overweening and benighted give us free heating oil, except to cock a snook, the snook paid for by the sale of orimulsion and by nationalizing private production plants?